Deborah Cadbury

Television career

After graduating from the University of Sussex in Psychology and Linacre College, Oxford, she joined the BBC in 1978 as a trainee. She went on to produce films for the Horizon strand and won awards for her investigations. Her Horizon film Assault on the Male, launched a world wide scientific research campaign into environmental oestrogens, hormone–mimicking chemicals that are harming human health, and led to her first book, The Feminisation of Nature.

She moved into history programming in 2003 as the series producer of the BAFTA-nominated drama documentary series, Seven Wonders of the Industrial World. The series was notable for combining live action with CGI, created by Gareth Edwards, and was described as ‘a ground breaking achievement’ by the Times. In 2005 she series produced the docudrama series, Space Race, the BBC’s first co-production between Russia and the United States with unique access to the Russian side of the story. As an executive producer Deborah continued her investigation of Cold War espionage in her BBC series Nuclear Secrets, which explored the race for supremacy through pivotal personal stories of the nuclear spies.

Writing career

Deborah Cadbury wrote her first historical nonfiction in 2000 with The Dinosaur Hunters, which examined the bitter rivalry between the early fossil hunters who pieced together the evidence of a prehistoric world. This was turned into a TV drama by Granada Productions and won the Dingle Prize from the British Society for the History of Science. Her 2003 book The Lost King of France, telling the story of the French revolution through the eyes of a child, Marie Antoinette’s son, received a nomination for the Samuel Johnson Prize and was described by historian, Alison Weir, as ‘Absolutely stupendous. This is history as it should be’.

At the height of the global financial crisis Deborah Cadbury went back into her own family history for her book, Chocolate Wars (2010), which unfolded the story of Cadbury from chocolate shop to the Kraft takeover. She coined the term ‘Quaker capitalism’ and she has given talks on the significance of this business heritage to Insead Business School, Birmingham and others. She is collaborating with Fable Films on a dramatization of the early chocolate pioneers.

More recently, she has written Princes at War (2015) exploring Britain’s ‘finest hour’ through the escalating conflict between George V’s four sons during the Second World War. Queen Victoria’s Matchmaking (2017) examines Queen Victoria’s role as a matchmaking grandmother and the remarkable vision of European unity that lay behind her schemes well before there was any notion of a ‘European Union’.

Awards

Deborah Cadbury was awarded an Honorary Degree by the University of Birmingham in 2013 and has many international TV awards for her documentaries. Nominations for her drama documentaries include: Broadcast, Royal Television Society and BAFTA.

Deborah has lectured widely on her books and films and has appeared in numerous TV and radio programmes. She has two sons and lives in London

Filmography

Reviews

Review of The Lost King of France by R.J. Stove, Quadrant 2003 Volume XLVII Number 6